How to Combat the Silent Treatment

The word balloon in panel four is way down low to signify that there is a long silence before I say it. A lot of comedy is in the timing, and it’s hard to communicate timing in a written medium.

About The Prisoner. I owned the whole series as a DVD box set, then when it came out on Blu-ray I got that too. The changes were interesting, not just in that the Blu-ray version took up way fewer disks and was much sharper. The most interesting thing was that the documentaries and commentaries on the DVD were made while the show’s star and creator, Patrick McGoohan, was still alive. The ones on the Blu-ray were made after he died.

The tone was dramatically different.

One paints him as an uncompromising visionary who was just too far ahead of his time to be understood. The other describes a tyrannical jerk who bullied a beloved character actor to the point that the poor man had a nervous breakdown. It also says that he was making things up as he went, wrote himself into a corner, and had to just spew out some nonsense to wrap it all up.

Not surprising really, that a person who created a show about a man constantly fighting against everybody and everything was, in his real life, a bit prickly. Watch the show’s opening credits (if you have THREE MINUTES to kill. TV used to be very different.) and try to tell me that’s the work of a mellow guy. It was, essentially, a show about belligerently refusing to answer questions.

Also, who packs for a trip to a tropical island, and brings along a big picture of a tropical island? It’s like he intends to raise hell if the beach doesn’t match the picture.

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